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Comment by justinlink | Hacker News Reader

Yep -- I thank those who fought that battle back in 2017-2019, as by time we got around to it, it was nothing. I bet we spent more time talking about if we should do it, when, and messaging than our support team has dealt with customers trying to use IE11.

It still comes up, we had a question this week from an IE11 user, and they just let them know to use another browser and they always do.

There is no fight left in the IE11 user base.

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Hopefully with Microsoft's aggressive updating policies in Win10 old Edge will be killed off soon. We'll be sitting pretty when it comes to web standards. Safari lags behind but not by much.

> We'll be sitting pretty when it comes to web standards.

You'll be sitting pretty on standards, or you'll be able to just target Chrome and forget about standards?

Exactly, what a ridiculous statement from GP. Now it seems like the web might end up in webgl canvases anyways

In our team, every time there was a bug in Safari, it was something awfully wrong in our code that just happened to work on Chrome/FF for mysterious reasons. I never had a problem on Safari with standard quality code.

HTML5 date and time inputs still don't work on Safari tho.

Safari 14.1 for desktop looks to be getting closer. Same for 14.5 on mobile.

https://caniuse.com/?search=Date

Why is it that iOS Safari was the first to support date inputs back in 2007, but desktop Safari, using the same engine, still doesn’t support it some 14 years later?

This is being far too kind to Safari. They were the ones who unilaterally decided that 7 days is sufficient time to clear out localStorage and IndexedDB.

Additionally, found this recent post going into why Safari is hot garbage. https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/

While the File System Access API is still being developed, I'm not holding my breath for it to appear on iOS. To be fair, it isn't supported yet on mobile Chrome (for Android obviously), but I expect it will be added quickly after the v1 of the API is finalized. I expect it will either never appear on iOS or it will take 5+ years from now...

Apple should ditch WebKit and adopt Gecko. Mozilla could use the funding. and the two organizations share similar philosophies on user privacy. It would also deal a significant blow to the growing Blink monoculture.

Why should they? WebKit was developed by Apple, and is deeply integrated in the OS.

It was originally developed as part of KDE (KHTML), although Apple have obviously done a lot with it since.

Yup, it’s a fork of KHTML, much like Blink is a fork of Webkit.

One thing that WebKit does better than other browsers on OSX is hooking into the native rendering APIs. That’s something that Firefox does a shoddy job at.

Apple probably has no interest in throwing good money after bad, with regards to security work involved in making that feasible.

By that logic Firefox should drop gecko and adopt WebKit. It’s already maintained by a megacorp and isn’t blink.

WebKit is close enough to Blink that this move would be bad for the ecosystem as a whole. More variety in web technology implementations makes it harder for any one approach to dictate the standards going forwards.

So glad you agree that having both WebKit and gecko remain active is a positive.

According to the book “Creative Selection” (by one of the original Safari devs). They tried with Gecko first, but the POC didn’t went far: the build system at that time was messy and they couldn’t get it work. So they switched to KHTML, because of the nice code base. That internal fork evolved to WebKit.

I remember peeking around the Gecko codebase when Firefox got popular - and yeah, it was pretty gnarly. I remember seeing related .cpp files in the same directory using different naming conventions, for example.

I’m told Gecko is a lot better now though.

The major difference was MS aggressively pushing against IE11.

It really gives management no opportunity to stand still on this anymore.

Heh, ya, same deal where I work. Dropped support I think two years ago now. Anyone who asks doesn't complain when they are told to use a different browser.

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